Peltola proposes corporate tax tied to worker pay in Senate race

Former Rep. Mary Peltola released a corporate tax plan Monday, her second major economic proposal in two months, as she works to make the cost of living the central question in her race against Sen. Dan Sullivan.

The plan would put corporate taxes on a sliding scale. Companies that pay good wages and keep the gap small between executive and worker pay would get a tax cut. Companies whose workers need public assistance while executives collect multimillion-dollar bonuses would pay more.

Proposals like this say more about a campaign's priorities than about what's likely to become law soon. A similar bill in Congress has never gotten a vote, and a freshman senator couldn't pass one alone. What the plan does is mark the ground Peltola wants to fight on: it follows her May package, which would end federal income taxes for working Alaskans earning under $92,000, and both lean on the same pitch — that wages, not just prices, are the affordability problem.

Her numbers come from outside the campaign. Workers used to take home about 67 cents of every dollar the economy produced; today it's under 58 cents, according to federal labor data she cited, and the Economic Policy Institute finds CEO pay at the biggest U.S. companies has grown about 1,100 percent since 1978 while worker pay grew 26 percent. The plan leaves open questions, though — it doesn't say how it would treat private companies, which include most Alaska employers, or how much it would raise. Critics note companies can shrink a pay gap on paper by pushing low-wage jobs to contractors.

Sullivan's answer to the same problem runs in a different direction. He voted for the 2017 tax law that set the flat 21 percent corporate rate Peltola's plan would replace, and he has long argued that Alaska affordability comes through energy and resource development — he was among the loudest voices pushing for approval of the Willow oil project on the North Slope. His campaign did not respond to a request for comment on the tax plan.

Both candidates are competing to own the same voter worry. Peltola described it in her announcement: families choosing between groceries and heating fuel, and young people who grew up in Alaska unable to afford to stay.